


Castles in Clouds

by AmazingGraceless



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Introspection, day in the limelight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 17:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30059088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmazingGraceless/pseuds/AmazingGraceless
Summary: Fay Dunbar muses on the nature of moving forward and looking back.
Kudos: 1





	Castles in Clouds

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Quidditch Fanfiction League, Round 2. My prompt was to use the song “Hakuna Matata” as inspiration. By the way, I’m noting this as a record—I did this in 18 minutes.

There were no worries by Dunbar Castle, as far as Fay knew. She could float out on the lake forever, she decided, the large lake a mirror to the sky, with clouds rolling over the water and the endless blue eternity that stretched out over her.

Here by Dunbar Castle, she could pretend that there was no war coming, no You-Know-Who breaking into the Ministry of Magic the year before, no rooming with one of the best friends of the Boy-Who-Lived and likely one of the biggest targets by the Death Eaters.

Lily had already written to her—her parents, despite being muggles, would not be letting her return for her final two years at Hogwarts. Instead, she’d gotten approval to study at one of the little pop-up schools closer to home, where she could come home every weekend and her parents could come and get her if the Death Eaters attacked. Not that they would, because despite its reputation as one of the safest places in the Wizarding World, Hogwarts was one of the most dangerous in Fay’s experience.

She frowned at her thoughts, ruining the serenity of the lake. The outside world wasn’t supposed to come peeking in anymore, not after her mom. Her dad made that clear all throughout her childhood, in how he treated Fay and her siblings. They never acknowledged what happened to Fay three days after she was born, how she was hunted down by the Dark Lord and his followers for being a member of the Order of the Phoenix.

She had thrown herself into being an Auror to follow in her footsteps, to defend against dark witches and wizards like her mum had, while making her dad proud with all the prestige she’d get for it. After all, her brothers and sisters were all talented and successful witches and wizards—but none of them were the type to go into being Aurors or Hit-Wizards.

No, they were Healers and Artificers and Alchemists—a bunch of scholars, all in Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

Fay had been the only one to go to Gryffindor.

She wondered if her mother was a Gryffindor too—she’d never thought to look through the archives of Hogwarts, to see if she could find any trace.

She’d never ask her father such things—according to him, the past was in the past, and they had to keep moving on, no matter how much it hurt. Because at least that hurt less than trying to confront what had happened, what he had lost.

Fay knew that her mother had been a muggle-born, although she never knew her maternal grandparents beyond the occasional Christmas present and a letter here and there that she couldn’t send by owl.

She knew that her mother had joined up with the Order, but she wasn’t entirely sure what she did when she wasn’t a member of the Aurors. Her father was an Artificer, working with technomancy and adapting muggle innovation to the wizarding world. He liked machines, she thought, because they made sense, because they weren’t messy. He could take a clock apart, enchant it to tell the location of every family member and not just the time, then put it back together, cleaner and running better than ever before.

He could keep moving forward, like the clock, never looking back.

After all, you couldn’t turn back time.

Suddenly, Fay was flooded with more questions. Did her mum play Quidditch at Hogwarts? Was she the one that Fay got her desire to be a Beater from? She hoped that maybe this year would be her chance to join the Gryffindor Quidditch Team. After all, Fred and George Weasley were gone, and she’d been practicing even without the Summer Quidditch League and the Junior Falcons to keep her reflexes sharp.

Her older brother had played for Slytherin as a Chaser a few years ago—he’d been bumped off of the team after some pureblood or another’s daddy bought his spot on the team.

Instead of fighting for his son, and his talent, their father just shrugged it off and enrolled him in the Junior League around the same time Fay was. He said that there was no use getting into a fight with the Most Ancient and Noble Houses, the Sacred Twenty-Eight—even after the war, they were too powerful, had too many Galleons to fight.

Her brother had thrown himself into practicing, in succeeding at least in this team—and now he played for the actual Falcons, and sent tickets to Fay for the Christmas and Easter holidays to come and watch him play.

She had once asked him, when practicing on the Quidditch pitch that the house elves had set up fro them, if he wanted his place on Slytherin’s Quidditch team back at all?

“I do, every day,” he admitted. “I can only hope that with the summer league I’ll get better, and then maybe a fair tryouts will happen, and I can earn it.”

But he never did—never had to. After all, hardly any Quidditch players on the school team, it seemed, ever ended up playing professionally.

That made Fay feel a little better about her own chances.

Although, she wouldn’t linger on Quidditch—no with the war against the Dark Lord coming up again, the Ministry would be in need of strong and powerful Aurors like her.

Her father had approved of such a career track, falling in line with her siblings—until recently, that is, when she came home from her fifth year at Hogwarts.

“Perhaps it’s better if you do become a professional Quidditch player,” he’d suggested. “It would be safer. And wouldn’t you feel tied to the past, following after. . . “

Even after all this time, he couldn’t say her mother’s name.

Not that that mattered to Fay. She had to keep moving on, as her father said. And this was a step forward, for all of them.

She frowned—the clouds were rolling in, it was time to get out of the lake. But she couldn’t help but wonder, even in the sunny day, if the spell of staying the calm and away from the truth and the past would last?


End file.
